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2.6 Billion-Plus Data Records Breached Last Year

April 12, 2018

Every minute, nearly 5,000 data records are lost or stolen somewhere around the globe: that’s more than 7.1 million a day.

New data from security firm Gemalto’s annual Breach Level Index calculated more than 2.6 billion data records were compromised in 2017 – either lost, stolen, or left exposed online – an 88% increase from 2016.

The good news is that the number of publicly reported data breaches dropped by 11%, to 1,765 last year. Even so, there were more data records compromised than ever before, many of which (1.9 billion) were the result of human error such as misconfigured databases and negligent handling or disposal of records. Human error-borne incidents rose an eye-popping 580% last year over 2016.

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